Saturday, June 07, 2008

Keep your sticky mitts off our party votes

There's a bit of a bitch fight going on between the Greens and the Maori Party at the moment.

And the Greens started it.

They want those in the Maori seats to vote Green instead of the Maori Party for the list vote and encourage this by putting forward candidates - because the Maori Party vote is likely to be "wasted" due to getting more electoral seats in proportion to that party vote.

So, the Greens want an overhang, and to directly benefit from it so that National and friends needs a bigger majority to govern.In other words they want the Left to have more seats than their list vote entitle them to. Or, to put it another way, if the Greens get more list seats off the Maori electorate, that does not mean that the Maori party loses more seats - because they`ll probably get more than they currently have- but there will be more MPs in parliament, creating a bigger Maori seat overhang.

If the Maori Party don`t like the Greens putting forward low profile candidates in the Maori seats as it may take off list votes that may not be needed, it should work to increase its list vote in the wider electorate, not just the Maori electorate.

2 Comments:

As the new local electorates keep eating up list seats in the 120 seat House, deliberately trying to create an overhang may not be a bad way to handle the problem unless and until the number of seats are adjusted or someone, somewhere has the guts to accept that the population of the South Island is falling and they should accept they should have fewer electorates. They are well-served by list MPs anyway.

I'm personally not in favour of rorting the voting system by trying to have ones cake and eat it too by splitting the vote this way. If one or both of the major parties were to do it (run two parties - one for list and one for local....and "double" their seats) there would by justified outrage. Which is why they don't do it.

I regret supporting MMP, as many do. It was the other suplementary vote system that should have been adopted. We were all too confident that we would get good candidates in list parties.....

If you want to take away the South Island electorates, so that the NI can continue to take advantage of the SI productivity, then it is time to cut the cable and leave our lakes full. There is too great an energy loss sending the power to Auckland anyway. A sensible Green Party would advocate incentives to move production to the South Island where the energy is. However government policies have forced production northwards.

West Coast lost access to sustainable utilisation of rimu forests, because Auckland decided they wanted the trees to stay there (even though most have never visited the WCSI).

And, I am a North Islander by heritage. However I like the Norwegian approach to society. The lack of control over Auckland is incredibly damaging for NZ society, it is a runaway train.